The first time I posted on LinkedIn after quitting I read it back ten times. Imagined specific people seeing it. Deleted it. Reposted it. Deleted it again. By the third one nobody was reading anyway, but the cringe had been doing the work it always does.
There's a thing people say about getting over self-consciousness. That somewhere along the way you stop caring what people think. That's not what happens. You don't stop caring. You stop noticing that you care. The signal you've made it through is that you read your old posts and notice they were fine. They weren't embarrassing. You were embarrassed.
The cringe was a feature of the channel, not the content.
I tweet red40. I tweeted that ai.ai would have been the best pirating website. I have a running counter of how many new models came out this month, currently at twelve. None of these are smart, none are strategic, none have a CTA. They're the only proof that I'm a person and not a brand. The corporate-LinkedIn voice has zero distance from a thousand other accounts who all sound like they were generated by the same content team. The joke is the only differentiator.
Awkward beats invisible. Every time. The friction you're avoiding when you don't post the dumb thing is the same friction the algorithm uses to find you. Smart, careful, calibrated content gets baseline reach because it sounds like everyone else's smart careful calibrated content. The throwaway tweet is what makes someone follow the thread to find the serious post next to it.
The discipline isn't picking which to post. It's posting both. The joke makes the essay readable. The essay makes the joke meaningful. Together they're a person. Apart they're either content or noise.
I used to write everything assuming a hiring manager was reading. I now write everything assuming nobody is reading, which is more accurate and produces better writing. If somebody is reading, great. If not, the practice itself is the point.
There was no moment I made the shift. I notice it in retrospect by comparing how much I'd have edited this paragraph in January (a lot) versus how much I'm editing it now (one pass, then ship). Same brain. Different default.
Somewhere along the way is a real place. You don't arrive at it. You just look up one day and realize you're already there.
— Simon